Fred Hume

Mayor Frederick Hume (right) receiving a plaque on the occasion of the 1955 Gray Cup

Frederick "Fred" John Hume (born May 2, 1892 in New Westminster , British Columbia , † February 17, 1967 in West Vancouver , British Columbia) was a Canadian lacrosse player , entrepreneur , politician , and football , lacrosse and ice hockey official . After starting his career as a local politician, he was mayor of his hometown New Westminster from 1934 to 1941 and mayor of Vancouver from 1951 to 1958 . At the same time, he was already working as a sports official, which he continued to do after leaving politics.

For his ice hockey activities, among other things, a large part of the work on amateur and professional hockey in the Pacific Northwest in these years is credited to him , he was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1962. The owner of the later NHL franchise Vancouver Canucks was always keen to integrate an NHL franchise in Vancouver.

life and career

Fred Hume was born on May 2, 1892 to John and Alice Hume in a small wooden house in the small town of New Westminster in the Canadian province of British Columbia, part of the metropolitan area of ​​Vancouver . His grandfather belonged to the Royal Engineers under the then Colonel Moody , who built British Columbia during this time. In 1859 his grandmother and grandfather were among the first settlers to settle in what is now New Westminster, coming from Scotland . After his father died early, he dropped out of school at the age of 13 to support his mother and siblings and took on numerous different jobs during this time. Among other things, he worked as a telephone line fitter for the BC Telephone Company , but ended his engagement there when the newly wed father of two children was to be sent to Victoria . At a young age he was active in local politics and was elected to the city council of his hometown in 1921, at the age of 29.

At the same time, he began a sports career as a lacrosse player in New Westminster and founded an electrical contractor company together with a partner . Also at a young age, he served from 1926 to the early 1930s as president of the Westminster Royals soccer team , which he co-founded and with which he won the Canadian National Challenge Cup , the Canadian championship at the time, for the first time in 1928 . Also in 1930 and 1931 he won this competition with the team and was with the team as their president also three-time Province Cup winner of British Columbia (1929–1931), as well as two-time Mainland Cup winner (1928–1929), the championship of Lower Mainland . As a councilor of New Westminster, he was elected mayor in 1934, which he held until 1941. Even during this time, Hume continued to work as a sports official. So he formed the New Westminster Salmonbellies anew, which previously only played lacrosse outdoors and from May 1932 also acted indoors. With the team, which from this time onwards was involved in the Western Lacrosse Association , which Hume had also co-founded, he won the Mann Cup as its president in 1937 , the championship in Canadian lacrosse.

Although he was already living in West Vancouver at the time , Fred Hume was elected Mayor of Vancouver in 1951 , thereby disbanding the Freemason of Melrose Lodge No. 67, Charles Edwin Thompson , from. In his office as mayor, he stood out primarily for his generosity and as a philanthropist, donating his entire annual salary to charity and working for a symbolic dollar . Parallel to his inauguration, he was on June 9, 1951 by the Masonic Lodge of the Shriners in the Union Solomon Lodge No. 9 based in New Westminster des Murat Shrine . During his time as Vancouver's mayor, he helped found the Western Hockey League , which existed from 1952 to 1974 , a professional ice hockey minor league at the time . As the owner of the New Westminster Royals , which he owned from 1952 to 1959, he took part in the game operations of the Western Hockey League with the team. The team that he led alongside Ken MacKenzie for years had to be abandoned in 1959 after constant profitability could not be maintained. The franchise was then sold to Portland , Oregon , where it continued as Portland Buckaroos until 1976, when it was completely liquidated.

In addition, during his tenure, Hume brought the British Empire and Commonwealth Games to Vancouver in 1954 , and a year later the Gray Cup for the first time , the championship of the Canadian Football League . He also helped bring the Vancouver Mounties , a high-class MiLB team with play in the Pacific Coast League , to Vancouver in 1956. After Hume, a member of the NPA , who was often referred to as Friendly Fred and is still considered the nicest mayor of Vancouver, was replaced as mayor in 1958 by the non-party councilor A. Thomas Alsbury , he retired entirely from politics and worked again in his own company. During his time as Vancouver's mayor, the Granville Street Bridge and Oak Street Bridge , a police station, a public library and the Empire Stadium , built in 1954 and demolished in 1993, were built . During his tenure, he was also discussed as Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia .

After he and his brother started operating the radio station CFXC , only the second radio station in all of British Columbia, in the back of an electrical workshop in New Westminster in 1923 , and looked after it as a partner, manager and DJ , he sold the station around around three years later for a transfer fee of $ 600 . The radio station still exists and is operated by the Jim Pattison Group . Over the years his company Hume and Rumble Ltd. developed. the largest of its kind in Western Canada . When the company was subsequently sold in 1961, Hume, who went into early half-retirement that year due to Parkinson's disease , became a rich man. In 1962 he bought the Vancouver Canucks franchise, which played in the WHL, from the previous owner Pacific National Exhibition for a rumored transfer fee of $ 175,000, which today (as of 2016) would be around 1.4 million dollars when adjusted for inflation. In the same year, he was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame for his constant commitment to bringing an NHL team to the West Coast . In the course of the next few years he invested a lot of money in the team and its entire infrastructure, including the Pacific Coliseum , to draw attention to the NHL and to guide them to Vancouver. The stadium was henceforth the home ground of the Canucks until 1995, before this was replaced by the Rogers Arena ; today the Vancouver Giants still play in the new Western Hockey League at the Pacific Coliseum.

After he had always worked to bring an NHL franchise to Vancouver, he never succeeded in doing so. It was only three years after his death that the city received a franchise from the NHL in the course of further expansion; “His” Vancouver Canucks then moved from the WHL to the highest ice hockey league in North America. The Fred J. Hume Award, presented annually by the Canucks, is still dedicated to the sports enthusiast Fred Hume; Another prize in his honor was once awarded every year to the player who was able to combine a high sporting standard and exemplary behavior in the course of the past Western Hockey League season. This latter award is equivalent to the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy in the NHL. In 1966 he was elected to the newly founded BC Sports Hall of Fame . Fred Hume is also a member of the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame , which was established in 1965 and into which he was inducted in 1965. He has also been in the Greater Vancouver Hall of Fame and was made an honorary citizen of Vancouver ( Freeman of the City ) in 1964 .

At the age of 74, Fred Hume succumbed to Parkinson's disease on February 17, 1967 in his home in West Vancouver, where he lived for decades and which was best known in the region for its impressive Christmas lights. The house and the lighting were subsequently taken over by the Canadian industrialist and billionaire Jim Pattison , the founder of the aforementioned Jim Pattison Group. Hume was buried in the presence of around 2,000 mourners at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Burnaby in southwest British Columbia.

literature

• David Blevins: The Sports Hall of Fame Encyclopedia: Baseball, Basketball, Football ... Volume 1 . 1st edition. Scarecrow Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-8108-6130-5 , pp. 1308 (pp. 472 and 473) .

Web links

• Fred Hume in the database of Find a Grave (English)
• Fred Hume on legendsofhockey.net (English)
• Fred Hume on the official website of the Murat Shrine (English)
• Fred Hume on the official website of the BC Sports Hall of Fame (English)

Footnotes & individual references

1. ^ Mayors of New Westminster , accessed April 8, 2016
2. ↑ Fred Hume on bcradiohistory.com (English), accessed April 8, 2016